At Eternity's Gate

As one might expect of a painter, Julian Schnabel’s take on Vincent is from within the artist. Hence his subjective views of the fields, of the artist walking, of the sun-dappled trees, and the artist’s direct representation as a voice over the empty/full black screen. The shots of Vincent walking in the fields are far longer than the shots of his actually painting, because that art is a journey — as much away from the mundane as into the dense layers of the work.

As Van Gogh says, his painting is a compulsion, his gift from God, what keeps him alive and sane, and a refuge from thinking and disintegrating.

As the title suggests, this is the artist as spiritual seeker. In Van Gogh’s interview wth the  pastor two religious systems collide: the authority’s institutional, mediated experience of the theoretical divine vs the visionary artist’s personal, direct experience of the divine in nature. The pastor finds the painting ugly because its energy is alien to him, as is the direct, unmediated passion of the visionary.  The pastor is only used to the simple surface of nature, not its meaning (for which he prefers The Book).

The full screen shots of the pastor show a wan, subdued landscape. He is sensitive, caring, humane, but unable to fathom Vincent’s alternative dedication and experience. His conventional religion is learned but not sweated out to the point of fainting and hallucinating, as Vincent’s is. 

  In virtually all these scenes of Vincent painting, he works in darkness.The brightness is in his interior vision, his apprehension of the divinity he alone feels connected with. The ”real” sunflowers here are skeletal shadows of the blooms that live ablaze in the art.

      That’s what makes this film a valuable addition to the sub-genre, Van Gogh films, all those imitations of his legendary life. The narrative materials are by now familiar to all. What’s new here is the artist Schnabel’s attempt to articulate and — more importantly — show the springs and fruit of Vincent’s distinctive perception, which was religious as much as aesthetic. 

The Unorthodox

This very engaging, touching story takes us down two interweaving rabbit holes: a spectrum of Israeli orthodoxy, social and religious, which layers citizens according to their historic origins — Sephardic, Eshkanazi, Mizrachi — and the compromises that idealists perforce make in venturing into effective politics. Though the referents are specifically Israeli, the exposure of political maneuvering is clearly global.

What’s most Israeli is the tension between the religious and the secular. Hero Yaakov’s political awakening begins in a domestic issue: his daughter is expelled from the seminary on apparently false charges of excessive worldliness. The allegations of a slit denim skirt and a TV in the home are fake news.

That personal injustice drives the hero into politics. His personal campaign grows into a municipal movement. That success leads to a campaign for the Knesset. Each success breeds new problems, as the stakes rise.

Another campaigner softens into lay sentimentality when he hears The Bee Gees. More seriously, a shortcut in name-taking threatens the entire revolution. A campaign contribution melts into an apparent bribe. The need to succeed opens into the thuggery of bare-knuckled politics, within the parties as well as between them.
     The title works two ways. Its initial register is the religious, where there is a profound conflict between the isolation of the Talmudic scholar and the need to become politically active. But there is a parallel tension between the purity in political orthodoxy and the temptation to compromise its idealism — in order to become effective. That’s where the winners lose.
     Though the film specifically traces the development of the Shas party in Israel, the dynamics it details apply wherever politics is practiced.  

Creed II

The new Rocky franchise movie doesn’t open on the Rocky world but in the Ukraine. It focuses on the defeated Russian Ivan Drago and his bigger-chip-off-the-old bloc son Viktor.  
     Coming to see a Rocky flick we’re jolted to start in Drago’s world. But then we’re not living in the original Rocky’s world either. America is no longer the America — Nam war America — in which Rocky first taught his lesson that sometimes you don’t need to win. It’s enough to survive.  

  Present America has nothing of the hope, integrity and purpose that marked even that fractured America.  As America seems outside “America” this chapter starts in Kiev.

The strain of being outside is arguably the film’s driving theme. We meet Adonis Creed as he’s winning the heavyweight boxing title. But he feels no security in that No.One ranking, because he’s immediately challenged by Viktor, son of the Drago who a few movies ago killed Creed’s father Apollo.

Rocky himself is always outside, hoping to come in. We hear him before he walks on camera. The three-step climb into the ring is momentous, he intones. He lives a solitary life in a plain Philly apartment, with only Adonis to care for him. He lives like he lived at the outset, a loner, tossing his ball, crumpled hat and slouch. He owns a restaurant (Adrian’s) but he comes in at night to punch the dough — that’s all he kneads. 

Rocky has three emotional climaxes in the film: (i) the birth of Adonis’s daughter, his god-daughter; (ii) Adonis beating (spoiler alert) Viktor; and (iii) his own, long-alienated son greeting him at his door with “You want to come inside?”

Here everyone wants to come inside. Adonis feels twice compelled to fight Viktor because he has no other connection to his dead dad. He takes Rocky’s initial refusal to train him for the ill-advised fight as a personal betrayal, a father’s expulsion. In the (yeah, maudlin but hey…) graveyard scenes Rocky and Adonis soliloquize a connection to a dear departed. They need to feel in their dead family member’s presence. 

As it happens, Adrian remains a stronger presence in Rocky’s life than Drago’s wife is. She deserted her husband on his loss and repeats that when son Viktor seems about to lose. 

Adonis’s sweetie Bianca is a partially deaf professional singer. Their born-deaf daughter starts another kind of outsiderhood. But her mother and — thanks to Rocky’s tutorial on fatherhood — her father will totally embrace and include her. 

  Bringing in the excluded extends to the actors as well as to the characters. In addition to Rocky and the Creed family, the resurrections include Dolph Lundgren as Drago dad, Brigitte Nielsen (Stallone’s Ex) as Drago’s Ex, and Milo Ventimiglia as again Rocky’s son Bobby. 
     Paradoxically, our climactic sight of Rocky has him contentedly on the outside. His boy Adonis is in the chaotic ring celebrating his triumph. Rocky sits in ringside, taking it all in from a lower distance, detached, his back to us with “Creed” emblazoned on his jacket. Not Rocky but Creed. His ego is content, His creed has won another. He’s not in the ring because he has nothing to prove. Except for his suspended fatherhood.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers revive the tradition of using the Western film genre to reflect upon contemporary America, especially its relationship to its core ideals and history. 

If one thing sets this work apart from the traditional Western it’s its wordiness. Against the reticent Westerner, here babblers abound — the poetic Buster, the crazed banker, the “dramatic reader,” the tediously compulsive prospector and trapper. This Western occupies a time of noise and verbal profusion. Like today. 

Also against the genre grain, the film opens on high comedy that unwinds into the tragic. The comic is the hero and the mortal doom the sidekick. 

Otherwise, the six episodes draw on the genre’s most familiar icons: the innocence of the white-garbed singing cowboy, the criminal individualist ennobled by vigilante “justice,” the American aspiration to and detachment from European “culture,” the settler’s (here miner’s) violation of his idealized Nature, the hazards -- and faith! -- of the wagon train’s spread of civilization through the savage wild, and finally the ambivalent “glories of civilization” revealed in a stagecoach trip to salvation. In the 1939 Stagecoach the journey went literally to Lordsburg. The new film’s parables start in America’s political Now but move toward the universal.

The eponymous opening story records the death of American innocence and power. That’s the meaning of the all-white dressed singing cowboy, freshness and innocence but preternaturally gifted both with lyric and with gun. This is the pure America that supposedly was. So this hero is just slightly off. His skills are unbelievable. His ears are too big, bending floppily under his 10-galloner.           
       But as the gunslinger myth always proves, “Can’t be top dog forever.” So here the invincible hero perforce trades his spurs for the angel’s harp and wings. The ghost of the innocence of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — the ghost of the America that led the world in democracy, humanity and idealism —  gives way to a new, more pragmatic and corrupt power. Pause for reflection indeed, as Buster uses a mirror to take a backward shot, and again to discover his own mortality, despite his astonishing effectiveness in his world.

Buster’s nemesis, a black-garbed gunslinger, segues into the matching villain in the second story. In a setting of Beckettian simplicity and despair, he robs a crazed teller in an isolated bank on the creaking prairie. But for this model “hero” his destiny proves Absurd. His lynching is interrupted by an Indian attack, then by a bypasser, who only leads him to be lynched again for rustling. Anticipating the film’s last scene, the brief promise of a romantic salvation is curtly killed. That last black joke follows on the series of comic killings in the Indian attack and the irony of the stretched rope in the first lynching.

  The third story carries the film’s heart. It centers on a travelling entertainer, a promoter who tours the west with a pop-up show of “Dramatic Readings.” His “Meal Ticket” is a legless and armless young man who recites, rivettingly. His opening poem is Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” where a legless, armless torso discovered in the desert celebrates the global conquest of some lost king, now lost to time, obscurity and the dust. He ends on Prospero’s valedictory epilogue, “Our revels now are ended,” while his manager passes the hat — to a dramatically diminishing audience. In between come the story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s sonnets 29 and 30, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg pledge that “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Right.

As Buster liked to call himself a singing bird, the reciter here is “Harrison, The Wingless Thrush.” As his Shelley bemoans “the decay of that colossal wreck,” the Shakespeare enables him to “beweep his outcast state,” yet still feel equal to the richest kings. The tour initially celebrates the frontier’s hunger for culture. But winter comes, the audiences dwindle, and that classic culture is supplanted by a conman who offers more sensational entertainment: a chicken -- "self-taught!" -- that purportedly does math. Fake Math? Harrison’s partner is gulled into paying big bucks for that chicken. He dumps the lad who embodies America’s highest aspirations, for which grasping and climbing limbs are unnecessary.

In a variation on that theme, in “All Gold Canyon” the film celebrates the glorious abundance of American nature — only to pock it with a prospector’s hunger for gold and a young criminal’s fatal attempt to rob him. The prospector switches between singing “Mother Macree” and apostrophizing “Mr Pocket,” the spirit of the gold he craves. The humans pass but the glorious nature persists, defiled but surviving its insentient plunderers. As the landscape speaks plaintive to us, a remonstrating owl amends the prospector. 

“The Girl Who Got Rattled” provides an alternative example. Here people reach out to each other. The two-man team of wagon train leaders become involved with a naive young woman when her brother, a dogmatic, headstrong failure, dies of cholera, leaving her helpless in the wild. The younger man Billy wins her hand, but the older man unwittingly leads to Alice’s death by handing her a desperation refuge from abduction and rape. Alice found her brother Gilbert’s “certainty” oppressive and inadequate to the times. She accepts Billy’s preference for “uncertainty,” the pragmatism and openness required to navigate the world’s dangers. Alice kills herself because of her premature certainty that her guardian is doomed. 

The final episode continues that moral dialectic. The stagecoach passengers exchange conflicting views of human nature. To the cynical trapper, people are all like ferrets. To the sermonizer’s wife, people can avert sin, exercise virtue and sustain selfless love., such as she expects to renew with her husband after a three-year separation. The French sophisticate takes a broader view, positing moral relativism against the others’ absolutism. 
     The audience for this debate are a couple of bounty hunters, the one a diverting storyteller (like the Coens) and the other the effective killer. The latter’s ballad of romantic betrayal makes poetic expression and storytelling instruments of justice. Significantly, it’s the cosmopolitan pragmatic who cockily closes the door on his fellows’ fate.
     Two last points about this marvellous film, released on Netflix. One is the selflessness off its cast. Stars like Liam Neeson, Tom Waites, Saul Rubinek, stud the film with persuasive performances in which the actors have disappeared entirely.
     Second, this is also a film of breathtaking beauty. Apart from the effulgence of nature, there's the Monument Valley horizon with one peak an insolent raised third finger. The canyon echoes provide the backup on the opening Roy classic, "Cool Water," itself a fantasy assurance in the parched setting. Several shots memorialize the lone rider on a vast dark plain. From the solitary silhouette to the white covered wagon train snaking through the wilderness, this Western take on existentialism starkly confronts what America has now become.

Marnie -- the opera at The Met

Nico Muhly’s opera Marnie, born at the English National Opera but now at the Met, invites a new consideration of Hitchcock’s 1964 classic film. The opera is not a response to the film but an alternative adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel. As a result, the opera’s choices invite a contrast to Hitchcock’s. 

But first, some full disclosure. I have sung at the Met. 

However, I have absolutely no qualification to write about opera or music. Nor, more to the point, the confidence. 

  But I have written about stories, analyzed narratives. So a libretto may not be entirely outside my range of interest if not authority. On this blog site you can find my two analyses of The Death of Klinghoffer — the irresponsible production of which prompted my four-year boycott of the Met “live” screenings. As the Met may not yet have noticed, their Marnie ended my boycott. 

All three versions  take Marnie’s perspective in recording her futile attempt to win her bitter mother’s affection. Marnie is a trustworthy office girl who over and over compulsively absconds with the companies’ money. All three Marnies marry the handsome executive Mark Rutland, who catches her in the act, blackmails her into marrying him, then tries to win her over by raping her. 

That fails. In all three versions, Marnie’s compulsive criminality, frigidity and constant self-recreations are traced back to a childhood incident. Marnie’s mother blamed Marnie for a murder the mother committed.

Beyond that core plot Nicholas Wright’s libretto hews closer to Graham than Hitchcock did. When Marnie visits her mother she finds a rival child serving her, a girl in Hitchcock instead of the lad in the other versions. Hitchcock’s change adds jealousy to Marnie’s emotional confusion. The surrogate son rather addresses the mother’s trauma. For she killed her illegitimate newborn son, then blamed Marnie. Hitchcock changed the murder victim to her drunken sailor john. 

He similarly eroticised the scene of Rutland’s rape, which in the novel is expressed with Marnie’s revulsion. (Hitchcock’s treatment is complicated by later revelations of his frustrated sexual obsession with the actress Tippi Hedren.) Wright’s Marnie speaks to our time with “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘No!?” The furious music amplifies her perspective. When she slips into the bathroom to slash her wrists the magnified shadow and red suffusion keep us in her perspective.  

Graham and Wright put Marnie through therapy but leave the unearthing of her trauma to her mother’s funeral scene. There the mother’s midwife friend reveals the lie that has fractured Marnie’s psyche. 

As the film played to a mass audience, however, with the dashing Sean Connery as the game hunter husband bent upon taming his wild wife, he has Rutland dig up the secret. Not for 007 to play second fiddle. Not even to the oboe that Muhly attaches to his Marnie. 

The cousin Graham assigns Rutland as a threat to Marnie takes some curious turns. Hitchcock turned him into a suspicious, jealous sister of Rutland’s late wife. Wright makes him Rutland’s delinquent younger brother Terry. His quarter-face strawberry birthmark makes him Marnie’s fellow Outsider, his facial scar a parallel to her psychological.    

Jealous of Rutland, Terry tries to seduce Marnie, fails, but continues to engage with her. When he brings the police to arrest her he fulfills his pledge to hunt her down. He claims his motive is to free her from her life of lies. 

The opera rejects the film’s last romantic promise. Marnie goes off to jail. In her handcuffs she exults “I’m free.” Rutland promises to wait and she may return to him but her freedom is not dependent upon having a husband. Just upon finally knowing herself and the source of her broken psyche. In the last scene her mother’s grave behind her provides a black horizontal that with her joyfully liberated self forms a cross. This sacrifice brings her to life.  

If Graham’s rape scene is what drew Hitchcock to the project, Marnie’s  extreme and complex emotions suggested the operatic possibilities to Muhly. The two versions find different forms of Expressionism.

The opera opens on a monochrome office hive. As we dive into the secretarial  pool Marnie is one of a battalion clattering and chattering away. There is not much emotional potential to such lyrics as “I enclose an invoice for our services” and “I like your nails.” And that is the point — the soulless mundanity of the life Marnie adopts, to exploit her exploitative male bosses, until in Rutland she meets her amoral match. 

Hitchcock’s opening shot made a similar point. Marnie walks through a scene of painstakingly concentrated greyness. The only relief is the bright yellow purse containing her loot — and reflecting her guilt. 

So, too, the different takes on Marnie’s fractured self. The opera gives her a chorus of four other Marnies, similarly dressed in bright pastels, all helmeted with her tightly-wound hair. They embody her uncertain hold on her self. In the therapy sessions they take turns on the couch. A group of shadowy Men in Grey Flannel Suits also dance around her, the demons that would abuse her but play into her strategies. They embody her energy when she rides her horse Forio, in her only scene of joyous abandon. 

Hitchcock found a different way to represent the heroine radically detached from herself, from her past. In several scenes he plays Marnie against palpably false backdrops. Her childhood home stands against an obvious painting of the dockside where her mother plied her trade. In her ecstatic escapes aboard Forio the obviously false backdrop confirmed Marnie’s detachment from herself. As it happens, Hitchcock was long criticized for these scenes, their obvious artifice considered lapses in his skill and judgment rather than expressionist rhetoric. 

The Marnie opera, finally, strikes this amateur viewer as a magnificent, wholly moving work, brilliantly staged, scored with intensity and discipline — indeed, as good in its medium as Hitchcock’s film is in his. “As good as Hitchcock” is as lavish a praise as I can accord anything. 

Oh, yes, that “full disclosure” thing. Thanks for asking. When and what did I sing at the Met? 

Several years ago my wife Anne and I did that wonderful backstage tour of the Met, ending up on the stage in the empty theatre. Apparently I was not the first to ask our guide if I might sing a bit, just to add that line to my resume. I burst out with the first verse of 
— all that came to mind — Johnny Horton’s “Well, I’m a honky tonk man.”
     I’ve sung at the Met.  

Transit

In adapting German author Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel, Christian Pertzold strips out all specific references to Naziism. The French setting is explicit but the time setting is left open. The clothing and buildings are contemporary but without our cell phones this could be anytime, anywhere. The “cleansing” of “illegals” here is fascism attacking humanity. It could be in Marseilles in 1942 — or Washington in 2022.

Against a backdrop of government raids, public murders, terrifying sirens, a citizenry bent upon or suspected of serial betrayals, honour consigned to whispers and the shadows, the narrative unfurls as a series of touching, intense personal relationships. For a suppressed and doomed society, there is a lot of love here. 

Despite being warned that his friend is “dragging you down,” Georg tries to smuggle out his stricken friend and doesn’t leave him till he’s dead. Georg drifts into a friendship with the dead friend’s young son, Driss. Their street soccer blossoms quickly into a surrogate fatherhood that leads to double heartbreak when they’re parted. 

Georg’s attempt to deliver two letters to the outlawed Communist writer Wiede opens into another complex of emotional connections. Wiede killed himself in despair at his wife Marie’s leaving him. But her abandonment may have been out of political necessity and selflessness. She still loves him and wants to reunite. She’s falsely encouraged by the embassy reports that Wiede is proceeding with their plans to emigrate to Mexico. They, of course, are deceived by Georg’s having found himself slipped into Wiede’s identity. 

Marie is involved in another love affair with the dedicated paediatrician Richard. Though he feels bound to emigrate to start a hospital, he can’t abandon Marie. But she can’t leave off her commitment to recover her husband. As she and Georg find themselves drawn to each other, she agrees to leave with him only because she believes she will find Wiede on board. Georg tells her he’s dead but can’t bring himself to explain that he is now the “Wiede” she’s confident of meeting.

That is a lot of love. In such a troubled time, a time of such brutish, unnatural assault upon human rights, normal conventions no longer apply. Richard, Marie and Georg form a romantic quadrangle that only confirms her commitment to Wiede. The writer’s suicide may have been out of despair, but Richard’s and Georg’s sacrifices of their love for Marie are heroically selfless.  

Of course even their virtue is doomed. If the evil of tyrants doesn’t get them, there is always their malevolent aid, Destiny.  

The ending is open. We don’t know if Driss and his mother Melissa made it over the mountains. Melissa being deaf and dumb means her young son has massive adult responsibilities. His doom is imaged in his face being constantly shot in shadow. In losing Georg Driss loses his last hope of ever being just a child.Their old room briefly filled with immigrants reveals another bunch of driven, doomed souls. 

Melissa being deprived of speech is a metaphor for the period’s political silencing of individual voices, the government’s poisoning of communication. Her antithesis is the range of story-telling in the film. The woman in the street and the hotel manager both “tell” on Georg. 

The film’s sudden introduction of a third-person narrator confirms that narrative is a theme of the film. Wiede’s last work becomes a relic of a lost culture, freedom and spirit of resistance. So, too, the refugees compulsively unload their own personal stories. They confirm their existence and erect stories of survival— for now. 

      Under such horrible political conditions we make up stories to hide ourselves, like Georg’s embassy claim — as “Wiede” —to retire from writing. Or a fiction is devised to impose some meaning on a broken life. Thus the dog-keeper gussies herself up and has one last splash, a luxury evening dinner with the possibility of romance around her — before mid-cigarette diving to death.    

      The narrator’s intervention may also suggest Georg did not make it over the Pyrenees either. He can’t tell his own story. 

But the film ends open. We don’t know what happened to any of the characters. We can assume the worst. But Marie’s last appearance could raise the hope of a miraculous saving — or it’s a manifestation of how Georg remains haunted by his thwarted generosity. 

In any case the film closes on a musical eruption consistent with the film’s refusal to be rooted in any one time period: the Talking Heads’ trip on “the road to nowhere.” 
     These characters’ lives reveal a reality distant from the security Georg recalls from his mother’s nursery song, in which a range of animals find their way to their homes. Here there is no home, no secure emotional roots, despite the proliferation of people needing and committing to emotional relationships. Here the fascist government has stripped all lives of security and warmth, leaving everyone in — transit. And indeed, it’s a pretty sick transit, Gloria.  

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

A blessing — another Orson Welles feature (i.e., masterwork) to live with over the years, to re-experience at every opportunity and to grow into and along with over time. Sure, 50 years after Welles’s filming, other hands finally put it together — but those hands knew Welles, knew his aspirations and instincts and know the medium. We can read Welles in it.

On my first viewing, my first take is the bookend it forms with his titanic debut, Citizen Kane (1941). Welles’s curtain call plays off his bow, his valedictory off his arrival.

  Both films start with the death of a famous, powerful man. Both films explore that character’s enigma. In both the apparent power is revealed to conceal a vulnerability, a weakness. Kane’s aspirations ultimately fail his need to achieve any reconciling grace or satisfaction. Long after he lost everything, he loses everything. 

The film’s lesson is that we can never know Kane — or indeed anyone —  on the basis of biographic facts and experience. We’re all unfathomable enigmas — which we take pains to remain. 

So even when we “know” what “Rosebud” is — whether it’s the sleigh we see in the film, or the psychological implications we can still within the narrative impute to it, or the flower's place in our poetry ("Gather ye..."), or even that it was Hearst’s private term for Marion Davies’s pudendum, as outside research teaches us — we’re no closer to knowing Kane. Or anyone.  
     The fire that identifies the burning sled kicks up a thick obscuring smoke, not light. That is, the illumination is a deception. Our "knowledge" obscures. Similarly, in the earlier projection room scene the heads project dark shadows not light. (And similarly unsettlingly, Joseph Cotten appears in the scene and speaks but not as the character he portrays). The film closes on the same dark wire fence and sign that brought us into the film: “No Trespassing.” The film let us in only to remind us we’re left outside.

In this last film as in that first Welles deploys an unprecedented command over his own expansion of film rhetoric and devices. However expansive the medium’s growth the Maestro could still deploy it in inventive ways. As a newsreel triggers Kane, here Jake Hannaford’s unfinished contemporary feature triggers a documentary about its ambitions and disappearance. 

Some cast members evoke the Welles career, most notably Paul Stewart — the secret bearer in Kane, is a similarly wily Costello here —  and Mercedes McCambridge, still a forceful gangleader, promoted from Touch of Evil. Lilli Palmer evokes the latter’s Dietrich. 

Welles deploys the wide range of film stock, sound and colour resources, the narrative liberty (chaos?) even beyond what the new bloods of the ‘70s were doing. Some 30 years after his initial mastery and innovation, the old guy struts that swagger again. 

As the film world raved about the new maestro Antonioni’s ground-breaking Zabriskie Point (1970), King Orson would have reclaimed his throne with this fascinating pseudo-documentary around an obvious parody of that film. Welles resets that particular film — and its culture — into an exoskeleton that’s like the hall of mirrors in A Lady From Shanghai. We see everything clearly but the mystery of perspective and reflection denies us certainty.

In addition to the new technology, the ‘70s cinema also gave Welles unprecedented freedom to show nudity. The inner-film footage predominantly deploys the nude beauty Oja Kodar, Welles’s last companion. The cast credits identify her only as “The Actress,” but she’s also named as Welles’s co-writer, presumably of the inner film. She’s more than just a pretty bod. 

The abundant nudity plays in several ways. Welles clearly embraces its new freedom in film. But for all Welles’s creative energy here, the blatant sexuality makes it feel like an old man’s film. It recalls Picasso’s late period of urgent, graphic sexuality — like an old compulsion recollected furiously in tranquillity.  

The sexuality also defines Jake Hannaford’s central enigma. Motorcycle actor John Dale evokes the success of Easy Rider and the doom of James Dean. Hannaford is himself reputed to hide his homosexual desires by seducing his actors’ women. As played by the gruff John Huston, Hannaford is the Man’s Man director, the Hemingway of the screen. The insecurity in this character’s maleness appears in his outrageous humiliation of the homosexual. 

While that scene feeds the current condemnation of Hollywood’s sexual power stricture, the film remains an open-ended, spiralling mystery. All the hints and eruptions don’t settle anything. Another enigma survives.

Again, Kane’s signature metaphor was Susan’s giant jigsaw puzzles. Isolated in the mansion she spent her life piecing together little bits of a large picture. That represents the jumble of pieces the questing journalist came up with on Kane — and left us with in the “No Trespassing” concluding dark. 

Having reached The Other Side of the Wind we’ve again been blown through a tumult of resonating and conflicting reflections on life and illusion — no better in the knowing but richer by the mystery. 
      I’m already looking forward to next time.

First Man

On the level of plot the title refers to subject Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon. The level of theme points elsewhere: The man precedes and predominates over the astronaut. 

From beginning to end the film puts us into Armstrong’s life, his experience. First as a father, his heart broken by the cancer death of his little daughter, then living a dedicated, stoic model for his young sons. The older son’s handshake shows the promise of his manhood., Then as a husband — sorely testing and relying upon his oak-strong wife. Finally, as the professional, disciplined, dedicated, steady even as his friends die on their parts of their mission.   

Ryan Gosling gives Armstrong a profoundly sunken emotional life, feeling deeply but all expression virtually buried. But for one outbreak, he keeps his head about him privately as well as professionally. His job interview for the Apollo mission is the most revealing since Judge Kavanaugh’s.

The film reminds us how human our real heroes are. Their losses, suffering and demands upon them and theirs make their successes so much more impressive than those of the superheroes. That makes this film so much more engaging and emotionally illuminating than the abstractions of Kubrick’s 2001. 

      Finally, this film very much addresses the American moment. That was the Kennedy future. There’s a sad nostalgia in harkening back to an American government that respected science, that propounded lofty ideals and that embraced America’s responsibility of giving the world political, scientific and moral leadership.

For me three moments stand out. One is the repeated scenes of the capsule spinning wildly out of control, Armstrong manfully trying to recover its stability. That’s the true American, of the great America, trying to bring stability to chaos, in the lab as on the globe and beyond. The good old days.

  Then there’s Armstrong’s rationale for the space exploration program: “I don't know what space exploration will uncover, but I don't think it'll be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it'll be more the fact that it, allows us to see things. That maybe we should have seen a long time ago. But, just haven't been able to until now.” His craving for the fullest possible perspective upon mankind and the universe is so at odds with today’s willful ignorance and tribalism.
     And the last shot. Armstrong and his wife have been through so much that separated them — even beyond the shattering loss of their child — that their reunion still carries a chill. They have so much gap to cross. In the quarantine room they can only play at a touch, through a glass darkly, a gathered pain between them. It’s the perfect end to a story of heroism so dearly bought. And an America so sadly lost.

The Sisters Brothers

A Canadian novel, filmed in Spain and Romania, co-scripted and directed by a French director, not surprisingly casts an acerbic eye on an American cultural tradition. Here it’s the toxic masculinity mythologized in the American Western mythology. 

The theme starts in the title. The brothers begin as their family name, Sisters, but are driven by their abusive father into a patricide, then into the hired guns’ violent cycle of deaths in life. Their colleague John Morris is similarly driven from gentleman to outlaw by his abusive father. The Commodore is the visible father figure, despatching his young men to kill until they are killed. 

Extending the theme of brutalized sensitivity, the town of Mayfield is owned and tyrannized by a gruff-voiced, masculine woman, Mayfield. If we didn’t know the actor is named Rebecca we’d take her as a man in drag. 

The Sisters’ mother has also done very well running the family homestead on her own, ready to blast away any attacker and even her own sons if they are coming only to hide from the law. For all her firmness, her home preserves the woman's touch.

The sons’ homecoming is an explicit homage to the opening and closing shots of Ford’s The Searchers. But unlike John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, these gunslingers can come in from the cold frontier desert; they can recover their civilized roots. 

Her sons personify delicacy abused, a feminine nature struggling to survive their violent pattern of life. Eli is the more obviously sensitive, as he treasures a woman’s gift shawl, chafes at his murderous career, and reaches out to others — the prostitute, the scientist, brother Charlie — with a reflexive tenderness.

But Charlie may still be the more sensitive. After all, he carries the burden of patricide. He finds an outlet in the bravado of his drinking and killing, but he still whimpers in his sleep, even after pretending to, to trick Eli. He also pays the greater price, limb wise.  

The dark-skinned scientist Herman Warm is the most feminine male character here. The utopian society he plans to establish — in (of all places) Dallas — is sensitive, generous, caring, free of profiteering and power systems. Its appeal not only converts Morris from his mission but drives him to accept his father’s inheritance, to dedicate to that cause.   

Morris and Eli share another sign of the creeping civilizing of the wild macho west. They are both introduced to the toothbrush, a radical encroachment upon their macho strut and breath.

Is “toxic” too strong a term for the Western’s macho spirit, under attack here? Not when you attend to the most dramatic metaphor in the film. Herman Warm’s system is to pour a corrosive acid into the water, then stir it, to expose the gold nuggets beneath. But that acid also eats away the flesh, if the men aren’t fast enough to wash it away. Charlie loses an arm and a hand to it, Warm the flesh on his legs and finally his life. 

America’s macho swagger may have delivered it some fortune, but only at the cast of flesh, blood, humanity.The lesson sticks.           
      There are no African Americans in this film’s wild west, though there’s a possibly racist sneer in citing one “Sanchez.”  The delicate Warm is played by a Pakistani rapper, Riz Ahmed, possibly evoking contemporary Islam. Director Jacques Audriard frames his vision of contemporary America very specifically here. His subject isn’t the racial divide but the high cost of violent male privilege — to the nation as well as to the trapped individual soul. 

Return of the Hero

This comic romance is set in the early years of Napoleon’s heyday. The First Empire asserted France’s new authority against Europe and promoted a new aristocracy, however seediy it seemed compared to the past. 

Against that heroic backdrop Captain Neuville plays a cowardly fraud who abandons his unit in war, abandons his fiancee, then returns to pretend to a false heroism. How rotten is he? The other stagecoach passengers can’t bear him. Yet the entire society succumbs to his ridiculous bragging. The hard headed businessmen beg to be conned by him.

His moral antithesis is his fiancee’s older sister, Elizabeth Beaugrand. She and her family seem straight out of Jane Austen. The heroine stands apart in wisdom, insight and character against a family and society of silly, greedy fops. Even her sister’s naive innocence betrays a sordid appetite. 

 Elizabeth too has indulged in fraud. To spare her sister’s despair Elizabeth writes her loving letters in Neuville’s name, maintaining his pretence to care and creating a heroic, widely successful version of the cowardly failure. Later she unleashes a series of schemes to defeat him, stopping only when his danger threatens death.

Like so many Benedicks and Beatrices before them, the sprightly snipers end up together. For all the film’s putative reference to its historical particularity, its satiric target ranges far more widely, of course, beyond 19th Century France, even beyond contemporary Europe. For, alas, the rampant spread of false honour, the seduction of the gullible, the grab for power by individuals or by states on the basis of false pretences — that is all quite too common in the current world. And that — not 19th Century France — is this satire’s target.
     Fake heroes. 

Private Life

  This wonderful, intense domestic drama has topics, conversations, relationships perhaps never shown before in American cinema. As it traces a fractious couple’s arguments and struggles trying to get a baby, it provides rare insights into tensions in a marriage and in its larger community.

  The couple’s dilemma is embodied in gynaecologist Dr. Dordick: Will the conception be by doctor or dick? The latter having failed, a range of alternatives are suggested, rejected, then tried, then lost. (Happily, the film is far too sensitive and tasteful ever to stoop to that level of vulgarity or silliness.) 

Professionally as well as conceptually, the couple have been disappointed in their lives. They live in a small flat in a pre-gentrified NYC neighbourhood. 

Richard (Dick, for long) was a brilliant off-Broadway theatre director until his company expired. Now he sells pickles in a market. He keeps an old Village Voice rave review at hand. (He has only one testicle.) 

Rachel is a writer between books, long obsessed with having a child. This is American brilliance, defeated. The intellectually rich, down at its heels and its mouth. 

And yet they end up representing American entitlement.  For all their inabilities, failures and disappointments, the couple persists unbowed in their quest for parenthood. They feel entitled to become parents, no matter their limitations, their failures.

Indeed, that quest seems to have become their only bond. Their quarrels and their compromises circle around that subject. They seem to have no other connections. They’ve had sex only once in the last year. They alternately erupt, then retreat. 

That obsession makes this modest couple a possible personification of American exceptionalism. This makes the intimate family drama a microcosm of America. Its confidence sapped, its limitations overwhelming, its promised solutions futile and illusory, it stumbles along in dream after dream, defeat after defeat, unable to acknowledge and to accept that some successes are simply not theirs to have. Their deluded quest for their Eden leaves them suspended at Appleby’s.  

A Star is Born (2018)

The key line comes early: “A Jon Peters Production.” Bradley Cooper’s new film closely adheres to the previous Jon Peters version, the one with Barbra and Kris. Very closely. Only out of discretion was this not titled Another Jon Peters Production, Another Star is Born.

Ally’s leggy version of  “La vie en rose” evokes Judy Garland sufficiently for Cooper to have cut her “Over the Rainbow” from the film (it’s still in the credits). His Jackson Maine replaces Norman Maine. But apart from these homages the ’76 version weighs more heavily than the ’54 on this update. (The March/Gaynor nonmusical is out of it altogether). Bradley looks and sounds like and plays Kristofferson. Ally has Barbra’s nose-concern. The score is updated but kindred.

The plot still works. That’s the nature of art, recombining familiar, basic elements, as Jack explains the elemental power of the 12-note core of music: “Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave - 12 notes and the octave repeat. It's the same story told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer this world is how they see those 12 notes. That's it.”

   The songs, lyrics, music and overall production deserve their warm reception. 

But I find the acting plaudits overhyped. If there are any proper Oscar performance nominations here they are Andrew Rice Clay as All’s father and Dave Chappelle as Jack’s friend. They feel real and new to them. The others make only marginal departures from their familiar personae. 

Lady Gaga is a pleasant and impressive surprise, but she remains an image not a fully-rounded new character. To remember what an Oscar-worthy “performance” might be, check out Glenn Close in The Wife. That is a nuanced, intense, deep apprehension of a character on another level altogether. That’s “acting.” Lady Gaga was excellent, but more as a surprising presence than as a fully realized new “being.” 

In my favourite irony, when Ally — in Jack’s view — sells out and accepts her new manager’s showbiz glitz over her simple sincerity, she lets herself be remade into — Lady Gaga. On that SNL show she perfectly matches Alec Baldwin’s persuasive “performance” of himself.

Cooper makes his Jack the centre of this film more than James Mason or Kristofferson were. He gives himself the more fully detailed backstory, with his problematic dad, sibling rivalry and debilitating afflictions. 

When his addictions are described as a “disease” the film is more attuned to our understanding than the 1950s. But the old puritanism persists when brother Bobby assures Ally it was all Jack’s fault. A disease isn’t the victim’s fault, remember? There’s more balance in Jack’s tinnitis, the other physical affliction that he fails to address and treat. 
     I show my age here, but this fine film doesn’t supplant the Garland-Mason one. I hope it encourages younger audiences to check that one out. It may be time “to let the old ways die,” but it’s also the time to revive the best old art. 

The Bookshop

“No-one ever feels alone in a bookshop.” This film revives literature and the literary culture/business as an agent of community. That makes it a bracing alternative to our current world’s creeping tribalism.

When widow Florence Green revives an abandoned, decrepit heritage building to serve as her home and bookshop, she attempts to bring both the old and the current culture to the isolated East Anglian fishing village. As she is welcomed by even the non-readers, the community shows a general decency. 

But that is in effect outweighed by what Coleridge ascribed to Iago: “a motiveless malignity.”  The primary villain is social leader Violet Gamert (the Violet feeling displaced by the Green), the ineffectual lawyer and banker, the traitorous Londoner Milo North and the unseen nastiness that drove Edmund Brundish to become a recluse. We don’t know what drives all that malice; it’s just there, an ineluctable element in the social fabric in that village as in nations.   

Brundish and Florence are drawn together specifically by Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a world that forbids books, Fahrenheit 451, and Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which at that time fired up the book-banners. The first valorizes the old culture and the second heralds the new. Indeed, just the bookstore scenes recall the vanishing species of … bookstores!

  This film aspires to the condition of the novel. There is a voice-over narrator, unidentified until the end. At least one sequence revives specifically the epistolary novel, advancing the plot through an exchange of letters. 

Some scenes evoke literature, like the pseudo-Edwardian party that Florence enters ill-fitted in her — not red but “deep maroon” — dress. Marooned she feels. The school scene evokes Dickensian cruelty. There are even interludes of novel-like landscape shots, that establish the setting, their metaphors of natural beauty and strength left unverbalized: the trees, the ocean, the blowing tides of a wheat field.

Florence's emotional beach scene with Brundish seems straight out of the Bronte tradition he loathes. Here he comes out of his isolated self to try to help his new friend resist Mrs Gamert’s high-level political machinations.  

  The angry politics may win here, but our defeated bibliophile leaves an impressive legacy. Little Christine — the wild-haired precocious little schoolgirl — picks up her mentor’s mission. Her first action may be destructive. But she outgrows her impulsive violence to advance Florence’s legacy: a large, successful bookstore run by the wild-haired woman she converted to read. One last irony: Will this magnificent woman survive the Amazon attack on independent bookstores?

So Lolita works beyond recalling the prominent literary scandal of the day. The allusion establishes a contrast between the two girls. Christine may have Lolita’s precocity in understanding and appeal. But where Humbert leaves Lolita as a prosaic defeated housewife, all her allure lost, Christine emerges as a strong, self-assured, competent woman of the world, reviving her mentor’s empire of literature, continuing her campaign. 
     Our reflex assumption that this film is yet another of the Brits’ attempt to relive their lost glory takes another shock. This film is written and directed by the Spanish Isabell Coixet. But that’s what literature does: it bridges cultures as it could the classes. 

Who will write our history

Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto was remarkably recorded and preserved by one history teacher, Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, and his cadre of dedicated friends who created the Oyneg Shabbes (i.e., “Joys of Sabbath”) Archive. It comprises 60,000 pages of writings, posters, announcements, photographs, product labels, doodles and other memorabilia. This film is based on historian Dr. Samuel Kassow’s book on the archive.

Dr. Ringelblum’s project undertook to record the minutiae of the Jewish people’s lives in Warsaw, from their prewar cultural richness, through the suffering under the Nazi occupation, to the tragic defeat of the uprising. “Will the Germans write our history,” he asked, “or will we?” Leaving it to the Germans would have left the Jews to be eternally defined by German propaganda.

  The intention grew from recording the day to day lives of the Jews in Warsaw, then detailing the gathering storm of persecution, and finally providing evidence for the postwar prosecution. The amassed material was buried in three caches in a cellar bellow a cellar. Recovering the two we have was like an archaeological probe under the ruins of Warsaw. Ironically, a church spire was used to locate the right ruins. Throughout the film, such poetic moments ruffle the wash of horrors.

Though this film is commonly labelled “documentary,” it actually interweaves documentary footage (in black and white) with dramatic reconstruction of scenes (in colour). Polish actors play the historic figures, with American actors (e.g., Joan Allen, Adrien Brody) doing the English voice-over. The  actors read the diaries from the Archive, but they’re still actors playing roles. That certainly does not diminish the realism of the drama, nor its significance and emotional impact.

The film was shot in Poland, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Its languages are English, Polish and most pointedly Yiddish, the momma loshen threatened with extinction. 

It was written and directed by the American, Roberta Grossman, who has worked in film and TV documentary for around 30 years. Her titles include In the Footsteps of Jesus (2003), Women on Top: Hollywood and Power (2003), Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action (2005) and Hava Nagilla: The Movie (2012). Her own career suggests she may have found some identification with the character who brings us into the film’s world, from the opening narration to the epilogue: Rachel Auerbach, a Warsaw social and arts critic whom Ringelblum persuaded to stay in Warsaw to help run a soup kitchen.  

There’s a curious touch in the title. Dr. Kassow’s book asks the question that inspired Ringelblum’s project: “Who will write our history?” The film drops the question mark. For now we know the answer. The Oyneg Shabbes heroes managed to write the history. This film passes it around.
     We should also observe how timely this history proves to be. It appears when Poland has been attempting to evade its historic responsibility for the Warsaw horrors. Worse, it recalls the kind of racist dictatorship that seems to be stirring itself back into life today.

Eighth Grade

There are so many beauties in this heart-breaking glimpse into contemporary adolescence.

It opens on Kayla’s YouTube video — a halting advice to kids to “be yourself.” Whatever that is, however to be it, that is the mystery engaged. These videos afford Kayla the appearance of confidence, self-knowledge, poise, success, in which her real life falls short.

Kayla’s day begins with her following a make-up instructional video to put on her face. Only then does she video herself waking up (“Ugh!!”). In scene after scene we watch her facial acne gradually reappear under her fading make-up. The film is about preparing a face to meet the faces that we meet. 

It’s also an anthropological record of the smart phone generation. The teens seem constantly plugged in, whether it’s Kayla at dinner or in her bed or the snotty Kennedy and her friend together/apart in the school halls. This constant connection betrays a tragic alienation. 

  Kayla’s scenes with her “shadow,” the four-years-older Olivia and her friends, replay that dynamic at another level. Olivia needs Kayla to be “cool,” “awesome,” to confirm herself. Riley’s backseat seduction attempt is a harsher version of the needy pretending to be strong. Kayla’s humbling there ends her YouTube pretence to grace. 

Her crush Aiden is the wouldbe bad boy, with his cool swagger, mouth-farts and rep for demanding sexy photos. Happily, Kayla abandons her training to give blow jobs and instead settles into the more civilized dinner party with Kennedy’s much nicer cousin Gabe. Over chicken nuggets and fries, across a long dining room table, Gabe and Kayla self-consciously attempt something so old-fashioned, a conversation.  

  This wonderful scene balances the pool party where they met. Kayla didn’t want to go to the party that Kennedy didn’t want to invite her to. The insistence comes from Kayla’s father and Kennedy’s mother. 

At the party Kayla’s slow approach to the pool conveys her excruciating fear, her sense of inadequacy, indeed shame. Her disastrous bathing suit emphasizes the inferiority she feels around those carefree, buoyant beauties. She seems to be trying to hide from that suit. Only Gabe shows any interest in her. He challenges her to a breath-holding competition, then shows off his pool handstand. Their dinner date is a hopeful parallel to this scene.  

As Kayla’s second “time capsule” box suggests, the struggle for a confident identity doesn’t end at any point in school — or any time soon after, as we elders know. Kennedy’s mom’s apparent interest in Kayla’s dad suggest these needs and ploys continue past puberty into adulthood, if not indeed adultery.

  As the film examines Kayla’s age-appropriate self-centredness we don’t learn much about the other characters. In her scenes with her father he tries to connect and she snappishly rejects him. 

They finally connect when he helps her burn her old box of dreams. Sensing her despair, he pours out his own emotions. He recalls his old fears about how he would raise her when her mother left them. He tells Kayla how much he loves and respects her and how confident he is in her ability to handle herself. She leaps into his embrace.   
      This connection should sustain Kayla — until her next everyday challenge.